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Monday, May 27, 2013

Friends Continue To Struggle With Trickle’s Passing

Friends and competitors
continue to mourn the passing of Dick Trickle, after the Wisconsin native died
of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a North Carolina cemetery on May 16 at age
71.

The
former NASCAR Winston Cup Series Rookie of the Year took his own life at Forest
Lawn Cemetery on Highway 150 in Boger City, NC, moments after placing a 911
call to the Lincoln County Communications Center to report “there will be a
dead body and it will be mine.” Communications Center workers tried to place a
return call, but did not get an answer. EMTs arrived on the scene to find
Trickle’s body lying next to his pickup truck.

“I’m still in shock,” said
NASCAR Nationwide Series veteran and longtime friend Kenny Wallace. “Dick
taught me a lot about racing and even more about life. I’m a pretty outgoing
guy – a little loud sometimes – and that rubs some people the wrong way. I have
a loud laugh, and my brother Rusty used to give me grief saying, `Kenny, quiet
down. Why do you have to laugh like that?’”

Dick always stuck up for
me, saying, “Rusty, leave him alone. Kenny’s just being Kenny.”

He always told me, “Be
yourself and never apologize for who you are.”

Mark Martin also spoke
of his friend and rival, after battling Trickle as a youngster on the ASA and
ARTGO circuits, before moving south to a NASCAR career that now includes 40
Sprint Cup Series wins.

“Dick made himself a
mentor to many,” said Martin. “Rusty, myself, Alan Kulwicki -- we wouldn’t have
been the racers we were when we got (to NASCAR) had we not come under his
influence.”

Despite more than 1,000
career wins, Trickle didn’t always lead by example. He was a chain smoker for
most of his life, and built cigarette lighters into the dashboard of his race
cars in order to grab a quick smoke under caution. He was rarely seen without a
beverage of some kind – hot coffee until the races were finished, then a
lengthy series of cold beers afterward – and he was famous for espousing one
hour of sleep for each 100 laps of racing the following day.

But Wallace, Martin and
others learned plenty from the Wisconsin veteran, both on and off the race
track.

“I was proud of the
influence that he had on us,”said Martin. “The etiquette and the way he raced.
He raced us real hard on the race track, but off the race track, he was very
free with parts or advice. He gave freely.

“He was the first to
tell me that, `in order to finish first, first you must finish.’ It’s kind of
corny, but it isn't when you're 18 or 19 years old. That always stuck with me.”

While they rarely
crossed paths in recent years, Martin called Trickle “part of the influence
that helped mold the people and racers that we were.”

Wallace, meanwhile,
recalled the Wisconsin native visiting him in his North Carolina shop just a
week prior to his death, giving no indication of the tragedy to come.

“He was his usual self,”
said Wallace, “laughing, cracking jokes and telling me what I should be doing
with my dirt cars. I knew he’d been in pain, and the doctors couldn’t seem to
figure out why. But I never thought it would come to this.”

Trickle’s
younger brother told ESPN.com last week that it was the pain that drove Trickle
to suicide. The day before his death, Trickle had undergone the latest in a
lengthy series of tests at Duke University Medical Center, hoping to determine the
cause of the severe chest pain he had battled for months.

"He told
me, 'I don't know how much longer I can put up with this,'" said Chuck
Trickle. “They were going to put something in him to help with the pain. It was
a five-step process (but) I don't know how far along he was. He must have just
decided the pain was too high, because he would have never done it for any
other reason."

Trickle ran his final
NASCAR race in 2002 and returned to his short-track roots for a time, before
cardiac issues and hip replacement surgery forced him from the cockpit for
good. He mourned the loss of his granddaughter,
Nicole Ann Bowman, in a highway crash in 2001, burying her in the same cemetery
where he would ultimately take his own life.

"I'm confused and broken-hearted
about what happened," said Martin, recalling the times hebattled Trickle night after night on tracks around the
Midwest. One evening – Martin believes it to be 1977-- the promoter of Golden Sands Speedway in Wisconsin Rapids,
Wis., offered a $100 bonus to anyone who could break the existing track record.
The 18-year old Arkansas hot shot smashed the mark en route to the provisional
pole, and as qualifying wound down, began planning ways to spend the extra
cash.

Suddenly, an open
trailer rolled into the pit area, with a racecar idling on the back. A crewman
leapt from the trailer and dropped the ramps, allowing Trickle to drive the car
directly onto the race track, without benefit of a single practice lap.

Trickle knocked Martin
off the pole with a new track record of his own that night, then schooled the
youngster again with a bit of vintage short-track advice.

"He got on to me
for breaking the record by too much,” laughed Martin. “He said we were only
supposed to break it a little at a time, so we could collect the $100 every
week!

“Dick lived on his terms, and he
died on his terms” said former championship-winning crew chief Ray Evernham.
“That's the only sense I can make of what happened."

“I wish I had known he was in pain,”
echoed Wallace. “Maybe I could have talked to him and reminded him how much he
meant to all of us. Maybe it would have helped. Maybe it would have made a
difference.

I remember watching him do the same exact thing(rolling in last second and setting fast time) at elko when I was just a kid running hobbystocks. we crossed paths MANY times over the years in ARTGO, ASA, and many short tracks around the country. If there was a finer racer(or man), I never met him. My all-time favorite memory: 1979 Rockford fall race, 2:00AM, Trickle staggering up, a female fan on each arm, a beer in each hand, a smoke in his mouth, sayin: "LET'S PARTY!!". I had no idea that those would become some of the most treasured moments of my life...........